At work, we've been working on telling and collecting stories about the school. So many great things happen that those of us who aren't in classroom don't hear about. Each of us has had the responsibilty of writing a few pieces, so I decided to do a piece about how we built our website and how it saves us money.

I had been meaning to share some of the Joomla knowledge I have gained over the last few years on my blog for a long time. Some of the best knowledge out there comes from researching a topic via Google. There's not a whole lot out there about using Joomla to build a school website. I hope this helps get someone started.

If you decided you wanted to change the size and color of all of the H1 (heading 1, the largest headline size) elements, you had to make that same change on hundreds of pages. If you decided that you wanted to add an element to the navigational menu, you had to also change every file on the site.

Part of the reason for this structure is that it’s the easiest and simplest in terms of required knowledge to implement. It’s also the most inefficient way to do it. Ideally, content is divorced from style and layout. The layout is defined in the website’s one and only page. The style is defined in a cascading style sheet (CSS), and the content is populated from a database based on what the end user is requesting to see.

Static sites are easier to develop (up to a point…size does become an issue pretty quickly), but harder to maintain. A dynamic site is harder to develop, but easier to maintain.

The first school websites were pretty simple, but as the website has moved from a supplemental item in the school's overall communications strategy to the primary medium of communications between school and parent, a powerful site that is easy enough for teachers and administrators to contribute to is a necessity.

The question is whether or not you should develop this in-house, or outsource it.

There are a lot of advantages in using software that was designed with schools in mind. There's far less time spent on reinventing the wheel. With an outsourced site, the hosting, server, and security issues would be the problem of our vendor. And features like email push pages (really just a fancy way of saying ‘newsletter’), calendars, and parent directories are are better integrated into the overall site.

The problem with outsourcing is the cost involved. I found that it would cost us over $100,000.

We chose to continue to develop our own site. Not every school has the option of going it on their own, but if you have someone with the right expertise on staff, it’s absolutely achievable.

Joomla

In 2006, after investigating several other options, I settled on the Joomla content management system (CMS) as the basis for our school’s site. Joomla is the tool that we use to manage all of the content on our site. It’s the engine on which the body of the site is built.

I don’t know of too many elementary schools using Joomla, but several universities are using it, including the University of Nebraska, and Oklahoma State University.

Our current site is actually our second Joomla site. From 2006-2009, we used Joomla 1.0 for our site. Joomla 1.5 was a significant enough change in the codebase of Joomla that I elected to take the lessons I learned from building that site and make our current site that much better.

One of the advantages of Joomla is the healthy add-on community. These add-ons extend Joomla, allowing it to go beyond just hosting articles. There are add-ons to implement calendars, accept reservations and donations, and for web stores.

I know of some other schools that using a competing open-source CMS called Drupal.

The Design of the Site

PDS Website

In 2009, when it was time for a redesign and re-architecture of the entire structure of the site, I decided to not start from the zero since a great deal of time can go into creating a good site layout. In 2006, I created the site’s layout from scratch, which can take weeks to tweak. I'm a one-man show. Implementing all of the new features I had in mind was more than enough work to keep me busy in the Spring and Summer, so I started with a template and customized it to fit my needs.

Even though I could have coded my own, it was far more cost effective to use one of the many commercial Joomla template providers as a starting point. Many of them offer menu systems, and special features that add a great deal of polish to the user experience along with the style of the site. As I mentioned in the requirements section, knowing how to customize the template to make it look like your own is essential. Just think of how many Blogspot blogs you come across that all look essentially the same.

In the independent school business, you are offering a product that your customers can get for free from a public school. Your brand helps reinforce the prestige and perceived value of your organization in the public eye.

The resurgence of Apple has proven that the design of a product matters. More than ever, we make decisions about products and companies based on the information we can find about them online. Schools are no different. The design of your site can communicate volumes about your organization.

As a parent, one of the things that frustrates me about my daughter’s school is a lack of organization of news on their site. I only have a limited amount of time as a working parent to spend reading news.

One of the guiding principles behind the design of the PDS site is to have the majority of information that parents need in one place. Not only that, but organize the information in such a way that parents of JK students don’t see news that only applies to parents of SK students. Don’t waste your customer’s time. If all of the content is relevant, you’ll condition them to not ignore parts of the page.

Required Knowledge

Here are the skills that are required to pull this off at your school:

HTML: When I started getting into web design back in the mid 1990’s, my dad told me that it would never go anywhere. He demonstrated software that would build your website for you. Microsoft Front Page, was the program. It’s 15 years later, and there is STILL no tool that will create a professional site where you don’t have to get your hands dirty by going into the code. Understanding HTML at an intermediate to advanced level is a pre-requisite.

CSS: An intermediate to advanced understanding of CSS is also a must. CSS is the best way to layout and style website content.

PHP: PHP is a scripting language used to run a great number of the sites you visit every day. You don’t need to know how to program in it, but a basic understanding will help when you find an add-on extension that almost does everything you need. With a little bit of tweaking in PHP, you can get it to do exactly what you need. Plus, many of the other open source content management systems are built on PHP.

MySQL: MySQL is a free database system. You don’t need to know that much about it…until something goes wrong. Understanding how to back it up and restore it, and how to repair a corrupted user session table are handy. Plus just a basic understanding of the structure will speed the process of importing information into your site.

Design: While there are professional, highly polished templates sites available for sale, most aren't well-suited to school sites. When you do find one that is close, making it look like your school’s brand requires design skills and expertise in Photoshop and Illustrator (or Fireworks). It’s also important to understand how typography communicates the importance and hierarchy of information.

Server Administration: This is one of those areas where I am a novice at best. You can always go with a hosting service, but I’ve had issues with that in the past. An on-site server gives you easy access for backup, and speedy uploads. 100% of your content providers are in the building. Having a quick in-house connection to the site is a major benefit. This is one of the areas where I lean on a college friend. I’m getting better at it, but I don’t pretend to be anything but a novice.

The Tools

If, after all that, you still want to go it on your own using Joomla, here are some of the add-ons that I found useful.

JoomlaPack

This free backup utility will backup your entire site in one step. You can then download the backup and easily move the entire site to another server in only a couple of steps. With the previous version of our site, I didn't have a way to test out major changes on the site. JoomlaPack allows me to create a backup of the current site and have it up and running somewhere else on my own personal hosting space, or on our backup machine in a matter of minutes.

Display News by BK

The built-in Joomla blog functionality allows you to display content from a section or category. Display News allows you to display it from multiple sections and categories. And you have fine control as to how it is formatted. You can have it output just headlines, or headlines and just the introduction, or output entire articles. It is indispensable.

Acajoom Pro

The newsletter engine for the site. Allows our users to manage/subscribe to news from their son's classes via email.

DT Register

I use this to allow registrations and RSVPs for events. It also has support for PayPal, for payment options.

Online Parent Directory

This is a feature I had been wanting to offer for a long time. It was one of the features I thought we'd only be able to offer if we went with one of the school site companies. Late in the summer, I figured out how to pull this off using an add-on called SOBI 2, but next summer, I will be reworking this using one of the social networking add-ons for Joomla. Community Builder is free, and JomSocial is commercial.

NinjaContent

Provides an interface in the front-end of the site for creating and managing articles. Joomla has a front-end interface and a back-end administrator interface. Our faculty and administration doesn't need to see the back-end. NinjaContent allows for them to create their homework and news items in the front-end of the site. It also allows me to limit some of the areas where they can publish items.

ExTplorer

A file system browser. You can upload, rename, move files, change file permissions, and more.

QuickFAQ

I use this to run our Question and Answer system. Our goal this year was to have a repository for the questions that get asked over and over again.

Costs

Other than the man hours required, which are significant, this is a far more cost effective way to build a site for your school. Don’t forget to build in the amount of hours you will need to spend on maintenance. You need to especially be vigilant about security. One of the benefits of using a popular CMS is the multitude of add-on options. One of the drawbacks is that with popularity comes hackers. I spend the first part of each work day reviewing the latest patches for all of the my add-ons, which are usually the weak spot in the security of a Joomla site.

Hosting/Hardware

You need to determine how you are going to host the site. Don’t make the mistake I made, thinking that a shared business account is going to work. These companies claim that your only limitation is the amount of bandwidth per month and the amount of space you use. Don’t buy it. We used 1&1, one of the larger hosting providers, and they shut the site down because of us using “too many resources on the system.” Worse of all, they didn’t notify us about it, they just crippled the site. It took me hours on the phone to figure out why our site suddenly began crawling. Your hosting costs won't be of the $10 a month variety.

We host our site in-house on an Apple XServe. We also have a Mac Pro that serves as a backup site. You could probably get away with a Mac mini as a backup. You just need something in case of an emergency.

Cost: $3500 for server + $1000 for backup + Hosting costs (ours is hosted internally, at no additional cost)

Software

While the core Joomla CMS is free, some of the add-ons and templates are not. Most are fairly inexpensive. I would estimate that we spent around $1000 on software for the site.

Conclusion

There are plenty of reasons why you shouldn't go this route. A company that specializes in website for schools will have insight into best practices for school sites. Security, backup, and maintenance issues are taken care of.

There absolutely is a learning curve involved in setting up a site like this as well, but it is a far less expensive way to go for an organization looking to keep costs under control.